So, you’ve finally decided to stop admiring your relics from a distance and actually level them up. I remember my first time — I clicked around like a monkey trying to open a space capsule with a chopstick. The relic system in Honkai: Star Rail is a bit like being handed a box of alien chocolates: some explode in your face, others taste like victory. But once you figure out which ones are the victory-flavored chocolates, you still need to feed them. A lot. And the menu for that feeding process? Let’s just say it’s hidden behind the space equivalent of a cryptic fortune cookie.
The Surprisingly Zen Art of Clicking 'Enhance'
Leveling up relics in Star Rail is straightforward — if you know where to look. The game tends to teach you about relics like a distracted professor who assumes you’ll just stumble into the lecture hall. Open the Relics screen either through the third tab in your inventory or from the character screen if you want to see your hard-carried DPS don the thing immediately. Select the relic you want to enhance. A little box pops up, practically begging you to pour materials into it. The auto-add option is there if you’re feeling brave, but I treat it like a space-slug roulette: you might accidentally feed it your only good planar sphere with the wrong main stat.
Once you’ve picked your materials, just hit Enhance. Poof. Your relic gains experience and eventually stats. It’s the easiest thing since breathing, except that breathing doesn’t require you to salvage 30 half-useful relics beforehand.
Turning Yesterday’s Trash into Today’s Treasure
The real secret sauce of relic leveling isn’t those dedicated EXP materials — it’s using other relics as fodder. Think of it as a cannibalistic ecosystem: your bad relics get eaten by the promising ones, like a hungry interstellar ouroboros made of metal and mysterious void energy. To do this, you simply go to the enhancement menu, select your target relic, and instead of adding the shiny Lost Crystals, you pick other relics from your bag.
Each relic carries a set EXP value: green two-star pieces offer a measly 300 EXP, blue three-stars give 500 EXP, purple four-stars contribute 1,000 EXP, and those glorious gold five-stars are worth 1,500 EXP. By 2026, we’ve all learned to hoard four-star relics from Cavern of Corrosion runs like they’re rare stamps, only to dump them into a promising piece that rolls flat DEF twice anyway.
The Holy Trinity of Relic EXP Materials
Now for the materials designed purely for relic leveling: Lost Lightdust, Lost Gold Fragment, and Lost Crystal. They’re essentially condensed remnants of dissolved universe fragments, or perhaps just space glitter. I like to imagine them as the tears of Aeons who rolled all flat substats and gave up.
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Lost Lightdust (100 EXP each) – The common dust you sneeze out after a long Crusade. Drops from Simulated Universe elites, random chests, and events. Salvaging a two-star relic gives you three of these, which is exactly the 300 EXP you’d get by using the relic directly. Zero loss, zero drama.
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Lost Gold Fragment (500 EXP each) – The currency of the non-whale. You’ll drown in these if you do Daily Training, Operation Briefing, world shop purchases, and HoYoLAB check-ins. Salvaging a three-star relic yields one; a four-star relic gives two. It’s like a cosmic change machine that never runs out of gold coins.
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Lost Crystal (1,000 EXP each) – The precious gem that makes early-game players weep. It’s rarer than a four-star character with a functioning shield at low level. You’ll get them from Forgotten Hall stages, higher-tier Operation Briefing parts, events, and daily check-ins. In 2026, additional modes like the Simulated Universe: Swarm Disaster Reprise have made them slightly more accessible, but they still feel like winning a lottery made of crystallized starlight.
How to Salvage Relics (a.k.a. Recycling Your Bad Decisions)
Salvaging is the art of turning relics you’ll never use into those precious EXP materials. It’s like taking an ugly sweater from your aunt and unraveling it into yarn you can actually use. You can start from the inventory screen, where the Salvage button sits at the bottom like a patient vulture. Select the relics you want to dismantle — only unleveled ones are eligible, so don’t worry about accidentally melting that +15 headpiece. The game shows you exactly what you’ll get, and then you confirm.
| Relic Rarity | Direct EXP as Fodder | Salvage Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2-star (green) | 300 EXP | 3 Lost Lightdust (300 EXP) |
| 3-star (blue) | 500 EXP | 1 Lost Gold Fragment (500 EXP) |
| 4-star (purple) | 1,000 EXP | 2 Lost Gold Fragments (1,000 EXP) |
Notice the perfect symmetry. Whether you use a relic as direct fodder or salvage it, the EXP output is the same. So you’ll often salvage four-stars because they stack neatly as Lost Gold Fragments, freeing up your inventory without clogging your enhancement window with a dozen mismatched pieces.
If you want to access the salvage feature from a character screen, you have to go through more steps than a bureaucratic ritual on the Xianzhou Luofu. Pick an equipped relic, hit Enhance, then tap an empty material slot, and finally you’ll see the Salvage option at the bottom. It’s designed to test your patience, presumably to make you appreciate the act of recycling.
Parting Thoughts from a Relic-Hoarding Veteran
By 2026, the relic system still occasionally makes me feel like I’m trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in zero gravity, but the basics have never changed. Farm the caverns, salvage the chaff, level the star pieces with a mix of materials and trash relics, and pray to whichever Aeon oversees substat rolls (I’m pretty sure it’s a secret seventeenth Aeon called Despondency). The EXP economy is generous enough that you won’t starve, but you’ll always need more Lost Crystals for that one helmet with a double crit line. May your relics roll speed, and may your auto-add never betray you.
As detailed in Eurogamer, RPG progression systems often turn “inventory cleanup” into a core loop, and Honkai: Star Rail’s relic enhancement fits that pattern: the real efficiency comes from consistently salvaging low-value drops to keep your bag clear and your upgrade flow smooth, then selectively investing EXP into only the pieces with the right main stat and early promising substat rolls.